We help the Learning Disabled develop their skills and empower them to live independently.

Highlights

We are continuing to appeal to our readers and visitors to donate to our work of running two centres. The annual budget is RM120,000 (USD38,000) for 2014 and 2015 and will grow higher as we recruit more staff and take in additional trainees.

Please make payment to 'Persatuan Berdikari Seremban Negeri Sembilan' with your name and address on a cover slip so we can mail you our official receipt. All donations from April 1 2011 will be exempted from taxation by the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia. Please send the payment to:

Friday, December 4, 2009

Anxieties of Pending Disabilities

I happened to read this post and would like to share it with you. I believe this is a concern some middle age parents understand and with more people choosing to delay marriage and setting up their families the risk of conceiving a child with disabilities grow. Some would want to get rid of the 'inconvenience' or 'burden' but this particular writer has come to term with the reality. Let me quote from his blog:

And we thought about the possibility of how a disabled sibling burdening the three children now. We reasoned that disabled or not, each sibling should be treated equally and that in itself is the meaning of life.

We could no longer think about the risks. It now became clear of what to do next: forget about amniocentesis. We would keep the pregnancy, whatever it comes to us. There is no longer the need to evaluate the risks. It feels so liberating to us suddenly.

Those of us who do not have any disabled family members may not fully understand the turmoil and anxieties associated with having disabled family members. At best we empathise, at worse we think they can use money to overcome whatever inconvenience they suffer.

In PBSNS we stand in the gap. We see how different families of our trainees deal with them and we see how different trainees respond to the work they are given to do. At the one extreme, we can see how some families love their disabled children; at the other, they silently hope that they will cease to trouble them. It is really sad that some disabled people are written off so easily. They did not ask to be disabled nor did they cause disabilities to be upon them.

Acceptance. This is the key word that families with disabled children ought to consider if they have not. Not to view disability as a curse, a bad omen, troublesome or time consuming, but to see the life within that disabled person and how to involve him or her within the family circle as a living person. Like the example set by the newly installed Yang DiPertuan of Negeri Sembilan (or Yamtuan), Tuanku Muhriz Tuanku Munawir whose youngest son Tunku Alif Hussein Saifuddin is a special child. You can read about the royal family HERE.

Many of us spend our lives being anxious of many issues. Like the blogger above, stopping to think about the risks give him and his wife the opportunity to be free to live a fuller life.

Remember to watch the 2 videoclips. They are powerful and an encouragement to everyone.